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Special Section: Public and Private Provision of Urban Public Goods
This paper was first given at the 2012 Social Science History conference in Vancouver, BC, in a panel entitled Life in the City III: The Public Sphere. I would like to thank special issue editor, Carol Heim, for including me in this volume, as well as the anonymous reviewer. I would also like to thank Dory Kornfeld and Karen Levy for their comments.
Introduction
In the summer of 1870, the Metropolitan Bathing Association of the City of New York sunk the first municipal baths in New York City into the East and Hudson Rivers, where docks and walls that surrounded slatted tanks allowed river water to flow through. With capacities in the hundreds, these free-floating baths, as they were called, protected patrons from strong river currents, and offered--for those who cared--a modicum of privacy. While working-class men and boys had long bathed at the river's edge, poor women now had a regular venue for bathing, at least in the summer months (Bier 2011). The baths were busy from the first day, and by 1888 15 were in use all around the city, with the Mayor's Committee calling for more (Hamilton 1897).
It was not until 1901 that the first free indoor municipal bathhouse in New York City opened at Rivington Street, in the immigrant-dense Lower East Side, featuring showers and tubs with hot water that could be accessed year-round: a poor people's alternative both to river bathing and to private bathhouses that charged a fee.1During the early decades of the twentieth century, many of these municipal bathhouses came to include indoor swimming pools, but they were largely housed in dank basements and underused by patrons2(Wiltse 2007). Although the landscape of social bathing was altered by the near-universal installation of indoor plumbing in the early twentieth century, many New Yorkers still lived in "cold water flats" and attended the municipal baths through the 1950s; the last municipal bathhouse closed at Allen Street in 1975 (Barnard 2011). Throughout their life cycle, these buildings were designed mainly for the administration of hygiene and orderly sport, including swimming lessons--although the boundary between hygiene, sport, and play, as we see in figure 1, was often fuzzy.